The harder we struggle against wildfires, the deeper we sink, like we’re in quicksand, says Mark Finney, research forester for the U.S Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station. “It’s called the fire paradox,” says Finney, a fire behavior expert based at the Missoula Fire Sciences Lab in Montana. “The more you fight against fires, the worse they get when they happen.”

In a nutshell, Finney and other forest experts say, periodic fires reduce fine fuels such as pine needles. They stop young conifer trees from growing into big conifers. Meadows form and break up continuous stands of mature forest. That’s how fire worked its magic for thousands of years.

Then, about 100 years ago, we started putting out every fire, or trying to, and that threw the ecological processes out of whack. In fire’s absence, conifers and dead fuels proliferated. So now when the forest ignites, there’s more fuel to consume and the flames are more difficult to control. And these days, there are 44 million homes next to forests at risk from wildfires.

Reducing the risk of wildfires to those homes is counterintuitive. “The secret to living with fire is having more fire,” says Finney, “not less.” Not more “bad fire,” Finney emphasizes, but more “good fire.” So-called good fire is planned, prescribed burning to reduce the fuels that can contribute to those big destructive fires that are growing more common in the nation’s forests, he says.

At the same time, controlled fires help create species and age conditions in forests that are less monolithic and more mosaic. Finney and other fire experts argue that we need to let good fire out of the box and start using it instead of just fighting it. “We’re living with fire now,” Finney says. “We’re just living with the worst ones.”